Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Anthony Adolph

Henry Jermyn – the hidden power behind Charles II’s throne

350 years ago, Charles II ruled over a Britain whose destiny – as a world power or a defeated backwater – was intricately tied to its relations with Europe. The King’s chief minister was the Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Sober and high-principled, Clarendon favoured alliance with the Hapsburg powers of Spain and Austria simply because they were the most powerful rivals of France. But Charles II did not pursue such a policy consistently. Throughout his reign, Britain’s relations with France vacillated between open hostility and close friendship. Why? A close study of the original records reveals a triangle of very human relationships at work in the Stuart

Monday

Austen Saunders

300 years of hating party politics

‘Whig and Tory Scratch and Bite’, by Aaron Hill Whig and Tory scratch and bite, Just as hungry dogs we see: Toss a bone ‘twixt two, they fight, Throw a couple, they agree. Tribal party politics are three-hundred years old in Britain. So is the fashion for satire which aspires to rise above it all. The British people have been dealing with political parties since the 1670s. It was then that a faction led by the Earl of Shaftesbury tried to have Parliament pass a law to prevent Charles II’s brother James from succeeding to the throne. Charles had no legitimate children so James was next in line. He was

Friday

Jack Van-Burholdbind

In defence of Giles Coren

Giles Coren’s piece in the latest issue of the Spectator has caused a stir in the world of graphic novels (‘comic books’ to the uninitiated). He notes that two excellent comics, Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart and Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot, have been included on the shortlist for the Costa book awards. This is absurd, he says, because comic books are ‘their own thing’ and do not need a tweedy literary prize to justify their existence. As a regular reader of graphic novels, I say ‘Amen to that, Giles.’ However, some of the brethren seemed to have missed the argument.

David Blackburn

Mike Newell’s Great Expectations will leave you with great questions

You cannot have failed to learn that a new film adaptation of Great Expectations has been released today. Publicity for the film is ubiquitous: posters of Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham adorn the billboards of train stations and the hoardings that overlook thoroughfares. The stars have been interviewed on television and the radio. Even the press has found time to divert its manic attention from Sir Brian Leveson’s clever, clever musings to review the film. The coverage asks the question, do we need another adaptation of Dickens’ well-studied classic? There are plenty of views but few of them bother to consider the novelty of

Thursday

Mark Mason

Bad Sex Award

Loins are girded and members tumescent, for next Tuesday sees the presentation of this year’s Bad Sex Award. The Literary Review’s annual prize for the worst description of sex in a novel never fails to raise the spirits. (Yes, I know there’s a double entendre there, but at first I wrote ‘raise a titter’, so think yourself lucky.) Hoping not to follow in the footsteps of Melvyn Bragg, Norman Mailer and Rachel Johnson are, inter alia, Tom Wolfe and Craig Raine. Wolfe must be a strong contender, his Back to Blood containing the sentence: ‘Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was

Mark Mason

Classic Coe

You sense that writing Seb Coe: The Autobiography (Hodder, £20) must have been a pleasurable task for the Lord of the Five Rings: it’s about his favourite subject. ‘I am known for many things,’ he says. And ‘I’ve always been able to read people pretty well.’ ‘Good athletes tend not to be good ball players, but I may be the exception that proves the rule.’ A crowd gets ‘classic Coe being Coe’. He even praises his own handwriting. Other people receive plaudits, but only for bringing out the best in Seb. Chief among these is the second-most important person in Coe’s life, his late father Peter, the athlete’s trainer for

Mary Kenny

Wild, wild times

There are, I believe, only two jokes in Diarmaid Ferriter’s latest voluminous tome: one, citing Liam Cosgrave, sometime Taoiseach, considered a rather dull character, who apparently said that ‘the Jews and the Muslims should settle their differences in a Christian manner’ (which is almost as insightful as the Tyrone newspaper which once carried the headline: ‘Catholics and Protestants unite against ecumenism’). The second is a quotation from a woman in Sandy Row, in deeply Loyalist Belfast, expressing her distaste for a United Ireland with the words ‘Dublin would have us practising celibacy on the streets’. There is no reason for a historian to entertain humorously, and Diarmaid Ferriter, Professor of

Juliet Townsend

Children’s books for Christmas | 29 November 2012

My 20-month-old granddaughter totters into the room. Her eyes are shining with the fervour of St Bernadette. She has caught a glimpse of the divine. Two small stuffed pigs are clasped in her arms. Clearly she has been in heaven. Actually she has just returned from a visit to Peppa Pig World, the most exciting experience of her short life. Anyone who has contact with very small children today will be all too familiar with Peppa, the toddlers’ Harry Potter in her universal appeal. There are two new Peppa books out this Christmas, both published by Ladybird at £4.99. Peppa’s Christmas Wish is a robust board book for the rougher

Ian Thomson

A heady mix of vice and voodoo

By any standards, Haiti represents a great concentration of misery and dashed hopes. From the air, the Caribbean republic is a sun-scorched clinker; deforestation, caused by a ruinous cutting of timber for charcoal, has destroyed much of the green. Since independence in 1804, moreover, a succession of emperors, kings and presidents-for-life has contrived to instil terror in the people. François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, dictator of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, entertained more than an anthropological interest in Afro-Caribbean sorcery rituals. His wardrobe of black suits and black homburgs lent him the aspect, says Bernard Diederich, of the voodoo divinity Baron Samedi, who haunts the churchyards in a top hat and

William Wootten

The Ladies’ Man

The ladies that he spoke to, soft and sure, Believed in dresses longing to be made Of no material but that very shade Of fabric he laid out. So his demure Debs’ fingers would dip gracefully to azure Yards of silk, and his housewives’ eyes, displayed A deep vermillion with a silver braid, Would find themselves seduced by its allure. On flipping round the CLOSED sign for the day, Before easing his scissors on their hook, The pleasant-suited draper paused a while At his tall mirror, practising his smile, Trying to figure quite how he might look Now all his many ladies were away.

Cressida Connolly

The thin end of the wedge

Aunts, generally of an antic or highly unconventional kind, are a literary staple. Anyone wanting to find the best of them would do well to turn to Rupert Christiansen’s excellent companion study of the breed, The Complete Book of Aunts. Literary uncles are rarer, but no less enjoyable to meet. Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew is one of the great comic creations, while Laura Shaine Cunningham’s Sleeping Arrangements is moving and funny by turns. A memoir of the two very peculiar bachelor uncles who brought her up after the early death of her mother, it is one of those yardstick books: you couldn’t really like anyone who didn’t like it. Now

David Ekserdjian

A selection of recent art books

With one or two exciting exceptions, almost all art books fall into a very limited number of easily identified categories, such as the monograph and the exhibition catalogue. In some cases, of course, they cunningly manage to be both, not least since the authors of some exhibition catalogues seem to feel that the last thing they want to do is to provide a simple guide to the material for visitors to their show. A case in point is The Early Dürer by Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser (Thames & Hudson, £40), which is brim-full of cutting-edge and often revisionist scholarship, but is written by specialists for specialists. Moreover, given that

William Skidelsky

Rich pickings | 29 November 2012

Despite its playfully obfuscating title, the rationale behind this anthology is pretty straightforward. A ‘fake’ is a fictional text that purports to be — or, perhaps more accurately, is presented in the guise of — a non-fictional document. Of course, there’s nothing new about stories of this type: the epistolary novel has been around for centuries. However, as the editors point out in their introduction (itself a kind of fake, being presented as a ‘how to’ guide), ours is an age awash with different types of written communication, from texts, blogs and emails to marketing mailshots, application forms and end-of-year-reports. Any writer inclined to fake it, therefore, has a wide

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The gulf of greatness

Ladies and gentlemen,’ Laurence Olivier declared in his clipped, semi-metallic tones to the audience at the Vic as he took his curtain call, ‘tonight a great actress has been born. Laertes has a daughter.’ The man playing Laertes to Olivier’s Hamlet on that evening in January 1937 was Michael Redgrave. The daughter was Vanessa, who would, as Olivier foretold, grow up to be a great actress. This vignette, you might say, contains all the majesty and mawkishness of the theatre. And a touch of its tawdriness, too. For rather than hurry to the bedside of his wife Rachel, Redgrave, it is said, slipped away instead to spend the night with

Wynn Wheldon

Redemption through rock and roll

‘I’m the President, but he’s the Boss’, Barack Obama declared a couple of years ago, and most Spectator readers will know Bruce Springsteen as the President’s celebrity pop star friend. (One of the first of the many pleasures Peter Ames Carlin’s book affords is the story of how Springsteen came byhis nickname: he was a ruthless player of ‘Cut-throat’ Monopoly.) Bruce Springsteen is much more than a celebrity, and Carlin’s book far from a dispiriting celebrity hagiography. Although written with the full co-operation of Springsteen himself, it pulls no punches in describing the singer’s faults and weaknesses, cruelties and mistakes. To his fans he can do no wrong (other than

Nigel Jones

Two angry old men

Though lasting literary friendships between natural rivals are not rare — Byron and Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Edward Thomas and Robert Frost spring to mind — few have been as durable as the one that began in the Front Quad of St John’s College, Oxford, one afternoon in May 1941 when a mutual friend introduced what their biographer calls ‘the odd couple’ by pointing his fingers at Kingsley Amis while imitating the sound of a gunshot. On cue, the fair-haired freshman yelled in pain, clutched his chest and staggered back to fall on a convenient pile of laundry sacks. Philip Larkin, a deliberately conspicuous figure in drab wartime Oxford,

Paul Johnson

A deeply stricken country

When, many years ago, I finished reading Cecil Woodham-Smith’s fine and tragic The Great Hunger, I swore never to read another book about the Irish famine of 1845-9. But they continue to be published, and they do not always agree. Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, whose title says everything about the book, claims that ‘fully a quarter’ of Ireland’s population died of starvation or emigrated. John Kelly’s The Graves Are Walking puts the proportion at one third. There is a huge difference between one third and one quarter. Which is correct? There is also much emotion. Coogan writes: If ever one required an

Wednesday

David Blackburn

A new short story prize, courtesy of The White Review

Where to publish my fiction? The question will have occupied all aspiring writers. It is famously hard to publish fiction in Britain, which is why each of the few prizes for unpublished fiction attracts vast attention. There is a new prize in this sparse field: The White Review, the thriving independent quarterly arts journal, has inaugurated a short story prize for unpublished writers. The competition, which is limited to residents of Great Britain and Ireland, opens on 1 December 2012 and closes on 1 March 2013. Submissions should be made at thewhitereview.org. The prize will be judged by the writer Deborah Levy, Karolina Sutton and Alex Bowler, editorial director at Jonathan Cape.

Daisy Dunn

The Way the World Works by Nicholson Baker – an ideal Christmas present

Nicholson Baker is intensely interested. He looks at the world like he has never seen it before, fixating on the mundane and capitalizing upon the strange lacunae which exist between seeing and understanding. In the purist sense, his interest makes him interesting. The Way the World Works is a colourful digest of his essays, conference papers, feature articles, and observations, divided into five main sections: Life (his own, principally), Reading, Libraries and Newspapers, Technology, and War. Well over a decade’s worth of eloquent umming and ahhing is encased in a single volume, a follow-up to his first, The Size of Thoughts. It is only in the book’s ‘Final Essay’, from

Tuesday

Stephen Mcewen

Eastern promises – the rediscovery of Stefan Heym

A German Jew fleeing Nazism to America; a soldier in the D-Day landings; a US citizen moving to the GDR for the socialist cause; a writer denounced by the Party; a Berliner politician in a newly reunified Germany: all sound like separate characters in a novel, yet all apply to Stefan Heym, the pseudonym of Helmut Flieg, whose strikingly under-celebrated life would appear to intercept a myriad of major twentieth century historical gradients. Despite being written in the 1960s, The Architects comes to us posthumously following years of state suppression in the GDR – Erich Honecker’s attack on Heym during a Party conference prevented the novel from seeing the light